IRAQ THE MODEL

I want to say that we’re sorry for the lack of updates yesterday and the day before; I’ll explain the reasons below but first of all Mohammed and I would like to thank everyone who’s been sending e mails and comments of encouragement and support on the great event of the referendum and also big thanks to fellow bloggers who’ve been generous with links sending traffic to this blog.

The situation of electricity has worsened lately in Baghdad; we mentioned earlier that terrorists have sabotaged power lines that transfer electricity from the northern power plants to the capital on the refrendum eve but yesterday there was another bad attack that targeted electrical installations that serve at supplying Baghdad with electricity from the southern power plants; both attacks combined left Baghdad with very few hours of electricity/day.
This led to an increase in demand on gasoline and diesel fuel thus prices have jumped from 4000 ID to 10000 ID for the 20 liters of gasoline (that’s if one could find it at all!).

This is what kept me away from blogging and…okay, I’ll stop whining!

The general situation in Baghdad is very tense right now especially that tomorrow is going to witness another historic event, that’s the awaited Saddam’s trial.
It is air to say that this week is the busiest in Iraq so far since the 9th of April 2003 marking important key milestones for both, the end of whatever remained from the past regime and the birth of a new state in Iraq.
Of course these events do not appeal to a small segment of Iraqis as well as many Arab and Islamist extremists from outside Iraq so I’m afraid we have to expect a surge in violence in certain regions of Iraq like Saddam’s home town (Tikrit), Anbar and a few districts in Baghdad like Adhamiya which I passed by this afternoon to see an exceptional deployment for army units to be ready for any acts of violence.

Tomorrow’s trial is going to focus on the 1982 massacre of Al-Dijail and for those of you who are not familiar with this town or its story I suggest you go and take a look at this post from the early day of this blog when we interviewed one of the survivors who was personally affected by Sadddam’s crime against that town.